Symantec Corp. [SYMC] formed Symantec Ventures to help cybersecurity startups accelerate the delivery of their innovation to the market, the company said March 2.
As part of this effort Symantec will both contribute capital and aim to help the startup community reduce expenses and accelerate time to market, acting as an accelerator.
The entity intends to provide entrepreneurs with access to technology assets like Symantec’s Integrated Cyber Defense Platform for enterprises and Digital Safety Plan for consumers, expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), go-to-market resources and use of the company’s civilian threat intelligence network.
Symantec said its threat intelligence data may be used to help train, validate, and debug machine learning and AI methods. Normally, that kind of data can be expensive or difficult for a startup to access.
The new unit’s mission includes not just acting as an accelerator but actively engaging the startup and academic communities by sponsoring innovation challenges, hack-a-thons and other activities. This aims to start new thinking in areas of Internet of Things (IoT) security, behavioral analytics, and machine learning.
“We are launching Symantec Ventures to catalyze innovation in the cyber security space. Too often entrepreneurs spend valuable time and resources building endpoint chassis, network appliances or cloud infrastructure instead of focusing their efforts on their true value-add innovation,” Symantec CEO Greg Clark said in a statement.